Most Replayed Moment: The Fastest Way To Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle! - Dr Andy Galpin

Dr. Andy Galpin is a professor and performance scientist with a PhD in Human Bioenergetics. He specialises in muscle, strength, and human performance - translating exercise science into practical plans that actually work. In today’s Moments episode, Andy explains the fastest way to lose fat while preserving muscle - without falling into the crash-diet, over-cardio trap! Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: Apple: Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr. Andy Galpin: https://www.andygalpin.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running. I mean, this is what most people think, right? They think you want to burn fat around here, the belly fat. The best way to do is go for a run. And a lot of people have very little luck with that and end up beating themselves up. So to close off on this conversation, I'd like to hear your take on that.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  You need to think about fat loss

• 0:29Speaker 01

  in a broader approach than most people give it to. Which is to say, when you say fat loss, let's get specific. What we're meaning is we're losing fat and ideally we're preserving muscle. That's what we typically want, okay? We're also talking about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible. Those are baked into that phrase, but oftentimes forgotten. So the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind. You're trying to keep as much lean muscle as you can and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you have to repeat again, time and time. Totally, right? Yo-yo dieting.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  In fact, one of the more, probably the highest, most cited paper I've ever published was on yo-yo dieting. Like a review article on that, so you can go read that. People love that paper. I was just a co-author. Jackson wrote that paper, so credit goes to Jackson for that. But making sure you're paying attention to those parameters in mind. How do I lose weight? You can look across meta-analyses and review articles and you will see the number one predictor of long-term successful weight loss, and by weight loss I mean fat loss, is always adherence.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  It's adherence to your workout program and it's adherence to your nutrition program. So step number one, before we worry about any change in diet, we start arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing. Like you're really wasting your time here. And a lot of that stuff, especially if you're not paying attention to what's going to make you adhere. The longest amount of time. In fact, if you just stopped right there, that's enough for most people. Can you put yourself in a position where you're able to feel abundant with your nutrition approach? And notice, I'm trying not to say diet here, right? It should be nutritional approach. You have a balance between living life and flexibility, but then also figuring out what

• 2:32Speaker 01

  triggers you and maybe you don't have a trigger, maybe you can be more flexible, maybe you need more stringent, like all the things that go into it. You gotta figure out a system. So you're not, people will not be on a diet very long collectively, right? On average, diets don't work, quote unquote, for those exact reasons, right? You gotta get to a caloric deficit somehow, babe, but you gotta do that in a way where you still are happy and Sustainable. Totally, right? And you still feel energy and you're, you're there and that it's working for you, right? And that's different for every physiology. Okay, great. And you gotta be, the exercise system, the same thing, right? If you hate running, there's no reason, you don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight. If you love running, you shouldn't run. If you hate lifting weight, fine, I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're

• 3:17Speaker 01

  concerned about is preserving lean muscle mass and losing fat over the long term. That's really what we have to, to consider the most. Okay, now within that, does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same? No, no, not at all. There are fundamental differences. Here's the problem to think about. If I said, hey, you're gonna do the same training program the rest of your life, you'd probably be like, whoa. But if I told you that with nutrition, people are like, well, yeah, of course, like there's, you know, magic diets that, like, no. Keto, great, meta-training, great, high carb, great, great, great. You can do them all. They can all work for you. Some people taking out gluten helps, some people, great, great, great, sure, all of it is possible, right?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  We come from very different backgrounds. If you look at any of the research, for example, like a really interesting point on genetic testing.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  If you're not taking account genetic background on that, genetic testing for things like nutrition, precision nutrition, is entirely worthless. Because we see classic markers that are associated with, say, more effective carbohydrate utilization, or fat utilization, or body composition. And they might predict a decent percentage of variants in European Caucasians. You apply those exact same things to West African or East African, and those variants go to zero. People forget that part when they start talking genetic testing. They have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds. The ones that have have shown they range from like 40% variants to zero. So like, really, like, you're way, way, way ahead of the cart here,

• 4:58Speaker 01

  paying attention to things that just do not matter. We gotta get you on a system that works. Okay, great. For some people, that might be more nutritionally based. All right, you can lose and preserve muscle mass really well by just going decently high on protein, and then regulating your calories. The example I gave you earlier. You wanna go more carbs, less fat? Great, you wanna the opposite? Like, we can play those levers. No problem. All right. What's your problem, though? Oh, I struggle with cravings. Okay, great. Oh, I struggle with hunger pangs. Okay, great, I struggle with... Okay, well, then, we're gonna make those decisions based on more this, more that, based on like, where is your pain point? What's your problem? I struggle with the... Okay, great. I have to... Now, we're personalizing, now we're individualizing,

• 5:42Speaker 01

  based on things that are gonna matter orders of magnitude, more than other things that I've just talked about, right? That stuff will trump it. Exercise, the same thing. Maybe you hate exercise. Okay, great. Maybe we can get you to walk a few times a day, and we'll get most of our fat loss through nutrition. Maybe the opposite. You love training, but, oof, man, you just struggle to eat whatever, or not eat something. All right, great. Maybe we'll play the game more with, you know, willpower, we'll push the pace on our exercise. High intensity, fine. Low intensity, fine. Weights, great. Cardios, great. Surfing, great. Like, I don't zone 6, I don't care. All of it can be done. Okay, some of the foundational things that tend to be consistent for those two things

• 6:25Speaker 01

  on most people is you need to make sure protein is adequate. Hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein, especially if we're going hypochloric. So keep protein high. You want to do something revolving strength training at least once a week for the same exact reasons, something that makes you burn a lot of calories, long duration, high intensity, either way, that's all you really have to do. If you can do that stuff consistently, over time, you're going to get there. You're going to be just fine. Where we see problems are people that put themselves in a positions of scarcity.

• 7:01Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know? Depriving themselves of

• 7:05Speaker 01

  deprive, you feel like you never get to do the thing you want to do.

• 7:08Steven Bartlett?

  Psycho, and this is a psychological thing, right?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:11Steven Bartlett?

  Which causes the yo-yo effect.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Which causes the, the problem of consistently adherence over time. Right? So making sure you do that. I personally have some go-to standards I like to do. I'll happily share that with you. I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our anaerobic strength training, high heart rate stuff and our more steady state, longer duration stuff. So if someone's going to be able to work out three times per week, I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration, call it a hike, call it a swim, call it a run, whatever we can do. And then the other two days, I'm probably doing a combination of lifting and then probably finishing with some high heart rate thing, right? So we'll do like a little bit of strength and hypertrophy muscle growth work. And then we'll do a circuit

• 7:56Speaker 01

  or an aerosol bike or some sprints or like, what can we get you into is like really, really hard. If I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human, I love that.

• 8:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any reason why you do the strength first and then?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's a great question. If you do strength training before endurance work, your strength training will not compromise your endurance. In fact, sometimes it exacerbates. If you do your endurance first, you're going to be more fatigued and you're going to lose strength and still have worse performance in your strength training.

• 8:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's the most important thing we haven't spoken about? You know, if there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know, that would allow Jennifer, who's a 34 year old, single mother, or Dave, who's a black cab driver in London, the average person?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I think it is exciting what's coming in the world of human health.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot of the challenges we're facing are going to get worse. We have things that are

• 9:03Speaker 01

  going to be possible pretty soon. Kind of the stuff I'm talking about. This idea of precision exercise, precision nutrition.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  It's not really available to many people, too expensive, etc. We're going to cross those barriers pretty soon. We are working on a project right now called the Human Digital Twin. So this is a combination of a couple of my companies. So the sleep company, Absol Rest, our blood work company, Vitality Blueprint, Springbok, there's another company called AxioForce that actually has four sensors in your shoe. And we can see early changes potentially in gait. So how you're walking, which could potentially, and research is needed here, but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development, neurological disorder. So we'll see this in gait before we'll see this in symptoms. Companies that are involved in this entire thing.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  We can take all those data, we're actually doing this right now.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Put them together and make what's called a digital twin. This allows us to make your physiology. And so from our perspective at Vitality, we've got all your blood work and molecular biomarkers. From Absol Rest, we've got your sleep, we've got your movement patterns. We can actually work with another company to watch you physically move and do that stuff. We can take your physiology and upload it. Then from there, we can run endless simulations of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation, medicine, movement, daytime, patterns, sunlight, water, all those things, and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want. It's not ready at all right now. But we're actually, again, running it right now. We'll have our first cohort done probably in the next week or so.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, really, really soon. I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it. I don't know if our group's going to be the best at it. It doesn't matter. But this is clearly going to be something the world is capable of. As we get better at being human sensors, and we can bring those data in, we're going to be able to deploy things like this and say, hey, yo, this is most likely to work for you. The digital twin is already being used for like the heart. It's in place. We have the digital twin of the kidneys is as well. The lungs are coming soon. The heart is coming pretty soon. There's lots of groups. I'm not involved in any of those projects. But that's it's coming on board. So the ability to not have to guess anymore. And most importantly, try. I tried this for six weeks. It didn't work.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I tried this for nine. That's going to go away really fast. Great. You still have to go do all the work. The technology won't work out for you. Well, we have some stuff that'll do that, too.

• 11:46Steven Bartlett?

  What's the cost, though? Like, when you were saying all of that, I go, do you know what I mean?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  We spent the entire length of human history with one, maybe arguably two, singular goals. One of them at the core was stress reduction. That was what we're after, right? You create communities. So you're safer. You create homes. So you're environmental. You create agriculture. So our food and we all wanted to reduce the stress thing, right? It didn't call that, but that's what it was. And then we got to the year 2000 or so, we realized, oh, fuck.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Maybe that was the wrong target.

• 12:21Steven Bartlett?

  I saw on your bookshelf at home, there's a book called The Comfort Crisis.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:26Steven Bartlett?

  And that just flashed in front of me as you were saying that.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, shut up, Michael. It's a great book. When we have astronauts come back from the International Space Station, getting people to live on Mars, it's a bit of a rocket problem. But it's a bigger physiology problem. And this HTT project, one is part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhart, who runs Human Works at NASA.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Figuring out that line of going, hey, you don't want to release stress. If you do, like what happens when we send people up to space because there's no gravity, your physiology tanks really quickly, right? They come back, oftentimes astronauts come back and they can't physically walk for a few days, right? Because in that case, that aspect, now other aspects of stress are way up. We've lost some of the core tenants that it means to be a human, and we are not ready for that. We are not ready at all to be able to be told, oh yeah, run this scan, and here's the exact culmination of life. You need to run. Not even counting the ethics behind all that. Like, the ethics of genetic testing alone are really, really interesting, to say the

• 13:39Speaker 01

  least. The ethics of doing something like that? We have not thought through this stuff, right? Collectively, we. There is more in our world than our human experience than just straight answers, right? This is one of the beauties of this ride we get to take. I don't know if we have good answers, but I think we've clearly shown, we're not very good at asking those questions before.

• 14:11Steven Bartlett?

  Never. Because the incentives in the short term is so tempting. We're seeing this with AI at the moment, it's just so tempting. And then we figure, we get the results back in 20 years, and by then it's just too late.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I mean, look at the current health position that we're in, right? We went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could, and oh, it worked.

• 14:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Oops. Now we have to go back and do this weird thing where we re-engineer stress back into our lives. You have to be very careful and judicious when you pull things out of a natural state. I'm being very choosy with my words there. If you're not directing stress, you're letting something else direct that. That stress is still coming one way or the other, which means adaptation is coming. So you can be intentional and point that ship in one direction, or you can cover your eyes and think it's not happening at all, and realize you're getting pointed somewhere else. It's better to at least...

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Have the acknowledgement. This is why the word consciousness is in the title of my book. It's, this is part of the process, right? You can be aware of it, or you can not. From there, you can choose whatever you want. That's entirely up to you and all that. I just want people to realize you're making a choice one way or the other. So when you involve technology into the picture, AI is another really, really challenging thing in a lot of ways. And I'll reiterate, we've seen this already play out and we know the answer is this gets worse in terms of we're not going to make very good choices right away. How does that manifest itself in the end? I don't know.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Nobody knows. But to date, we're not particularly good at making that decision. So there's lots of consequences there. I think that we have there. The last, one of the last things I'll say on this is if you break down, okay, the way that we structured it is there's four pieces, okay? In order for you to have more success at your performance and health, you number one have to have assessment. Once you have all this data, you have to go to step number two, which is then you have to qualify. Good, bad, great, worst ever, best in world history. Okay, we're struggling on that. We don't know what healthy it looks like. I know what clinically deficient rickets looks like. I know what obesity and type 2 diabetes and we know disease.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  We don't know what good versus great means. There are no databases I can pull from. There is no metric I can look at and say, what is a great, what's a great vertical jump number? What does somebody need to be able to jump in their 40s to be healthy? Like, we don't know these things and I don't know it by ethnicity. And I mentioned that before, that's a critical component because it is clearly different, right? There are some markers in basic blood chemistry that are not different in Southeast Asians or that are different in Southeast Asians versus Northern Europeans. Like, we don't have that fully fleshed out. And if we do, it's four disease markers. We don't have the, so I don't even know what I'm judging. Okay, now, assessment, great. Where are we going to get these databases of super healthy people as the world continues to get less healthy?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  I'm losing my population to pull from really, really quickly. Okay. Then the next piece is, okay, great. You've told me that this marker should be here. Pick your marker, whatever you want. How do I get it there? And that's really where we're struggling. So the second problem is what I call Polaris. Like we have no North Star. We don't know where this thing should go. The third one is, okay, how do I get there? What is the intervention? What is the thing? That's where I actually think people in my field are going to not only maintain, but increase their value, such as like personal coaches, physical therapists, athletic trainers, people that are going to, nurses. Because you might have an AI that can come in and run something and say,

• 18:18Speaker 01

  "Great, your numbers are here and our metrics say you should be here and then you should go do X." I want somebody there with me. I want a human taking me through X. That's going to feel better because we don't know, there's almost no data on, okay, great. Well, what is the optimal training for that marker? What is the optimal nutrition? That is really, really limited. So we have to rely on expert. We have to rely on people that go, "I know the evidence base, but then also in my experience," I'm thinking about this this way. If you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your ACL and we ran all that stuff on you, you would still come back and go, "Oh, great. There's a coach over there who's actually run people through ACL recoveries

• 19:01Speaker 01

  on 15 starting NFL quarterbacks?" Like, what's it going to cost? You're hiring that person, right? Because like you've done it before. Fantastic. Like the budget doesn't matter at that point because the person's actually done it and they will be there. Fantastic. I really feel like our field is going to increase in the value because of that. They're going to want to say, "Okay, awesome. The numbers came out on this. The AI told me this is there." You've done it before, yeah? Done it a lot? Great. I trust you the most. I want you by my side. I want that companionship. As we lose more and more connection to other people, it's my biased opinion in my field that like this is a great place where people want someone there. Online coaching is great. That's fine and all that.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  But you're seeing actually already a premium coming on like, you know, "I want to hire an in-person trainer. Can you give me that person?" We're like, the boom was the opposite for a while and now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person for all those reasons. So that is, I think, an incredibly interesting challenge.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  But that's, that's the way to think about it. That top one's going to get better. Lots of problems. But what are we comparing against? And then what do we do about it? That's going to be the real trick.

• 20:15Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.